The first is a Help Desk person assisting a user with some new technology (and having been a Help Desk person for a few years, I can really relate to this one!)
(If you can’t view it from this site, try: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX0-nqRmtos)
The second is a brilliant animation – again, if you can’t view it from this site, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=
(oops! messed up the embedding… will find out more and try again a bit later. Meantime, use the links! Sorted!)
One of the critical things for me in this lifestyle shift ‘down south’ was the ability to continue working for my clients, albeit remotely. Computers and broadband access are an essential for me – and both MUST be working. Which is why I paid for a Guru from PC Guru to bring down the computers and install my network and get everything working.
And they did – with a minimum of fuss, and with almost no issues found after the guru had left. The couple of minor issues that I did encounter got resolved on Sunday (yes, they work on Sundays to fix customer problems!! in fact, they advertise 24/7 support).
I’ve given PC Guru a good write-up before – and I can only reiterate what I’ve already said about their professionalism, knowledge – and service! So, if you’re in Perth or Western Australia – hell, they do much of their support remotely, so it probably doesn’t matter where you are! – and you have PC support issues and aren’t a big enough business to have an IT person on staff, give PC Guru a try.
(No, this is not a paid advertisement – I’m just a very happy customer!)
I’ve talked about customer service before, and about how for me it’s often not what the issue is as much how it’s resolved. [Example 1, example 2, and example 3.]
Today I read two great articles on customer service: one was from Kathy Sierra’s “Creating Passionate Users” blog, a blog I read every time she writes a new entry – this one was titled: “What tail is wagging the ‘user happiness’ dog?“; the other was on “Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service” on Joel Spolsky’s site (referred to by Kathy). I read “Joel On Software” every so often, and invariably he – like Kathy – have messages that resonate with me.
If you have a spare few minutes, go ahead and read them both – they’re worth it!
One of the blogs I read is Pamela Slim’s excellent “Escape from Cubicle Nation“. Her posts are invariably insightful and offer some great tips. But the one from Jan 24, 2007 was exceptionally good, in my opinion: “How not to be a cultural knucklehead in a global business world“.
As an Australian who lived in Canada for a year, who has travelled to the US more times than I can think of right now, who has travelled to other places such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines, Fiji, Tahiti, New Zealand, England and Wales, I related closely to her post and many of the follow-up comments.
Whenever I have presented at conferences in the US, I am very aware that colloquialisms and idioms that are part of my everyday language do not necessarily translate very well. Likewise, I have to slow my speech down a little to compensate for the ‘accent’. Just look for the glazed looks… they’re a sure indicator that you’re either boring, talking too fast, or using expressions that your audience doesn’t understand or relate to.
In the comments on Pamela’s post there were several about the confusion between distinguishing Americans (those from the US – that term was discussed too!) and Canadians. It’s no different to those in other countries confusing Australians and New Zealanders, even in some cases confusing the Australians with those from the UK or South Africa!
And I always find it amusing that those in the US think I have an ‘accent’, yet don’t believe that they do.
One thing though, that does irk me, is this propensity for US sport to have “World” competitions, yet no-one else in the world ever plays… just the US teams. It’s as though that’s the only ‘world’.
Anyhow, spend 5-10 minutes reading and digesting Pamela’s article. You may not agree with everything she says, but she does highlight areas where communication can go terribly wrong.
Wow! I just finished reading one of the recent Change This manifestos – and boy, did it resonate with me. It’s the one called “You are being lied to” by Larry Winget and is available as a PDF for downloading or reading on screen here: http://www.changethis.com/30.02.YouAreBeingLiedTo
One thing he said that resonated was about these so-called experts who write best-selling books on management etc., and how all they are really good at is writing such books – not about whatever it is they’re writing about. Call me cynical, but that’s something I’ve thought for a long time. A bit like the “pay me $50 and I’ll teach you the secrets of my success with betting on horses” or “here’s how to win millions in the lottery – all for a limited time, special offer price of just $199!!! Call now!” Yeah right. I can tell you that if *I* had the secret to winning on the horses or the lottery I’d be keeping it myself, not flogging it off to all comers for some relative pittance. If you’ve made millions on the lottery, then what the hell are you selling the ‘secret’ for $199 for???
(Be aware that the PDFs of all Change This manifestos take up the whole browser window – pressing ESC will force the PDF back into a browser window with controls.)
Warning: long!
I mainly work for software companies. And so far none of those companies have employed a usability expert. As the person who is the ‘user advocate’ when writing the documentation, I’ve worn the ‘she’s the usability person’ hat in the absence of anyone else stepping up to champion for readable labels, helpful screen messages, logical workflows in the interface, etc.
Ideally, usability specialists should be brought in at the initial design stage, then as the coding progresses, right through to release and beyond. Amongst other things, usability testing involves identifying areas where users of the software can get confused, then offering suggestions for fixing these BEFORE the software gets released. Fixes could include redesigning a screen, changing the text on a label, fixing a bug, and so on.
Such fixes cost far less when done before release than after the product has gone out the door. After release, the cost of fixing usability problems is much higher because implementing and testing patches, answering support calls related to things that don’t work as they are expected to, etc. all cost money. Then there’s the unquantifiable cost of user frustration – you know, the “I’d like to throw this bloody computer out the window!” situation I’m sure we’ve all experienced.
So, with that preamble, you can see that I’m very much on the side of making things as clear as possible for the users of the software. I’ve attended international conference sessions on usability, on writing useful error messages, etc. and I’ve worked with enough software in the past 20 years to have a clue about what expectations users have, and what can make their life a little easier. This is not ‘dumbing down’ the software application by any means – it’s about making it usable! Usable software usually garners passionate users (see Kathy Sierra’s great “Creating Passionate Users” blog for some terrific writing on this topic); unusable software tends to suck (to quote Kathy).
Last week when I returned to work, I had an email in my Inbox from the person responsible for testing (one of my clients actually has a dedicated tester – this is a good thing!). But I was completely GOBSMACKED by his response to one of my requests for a useful error message instead of the gobbledegook programmer-speak that was displayed. I won’t quote the request, or his complete response – I think you’ll get the gist of it in these couple of lines: “In my opinion trapping exceptions with … plain english dialogs is folly; a waste of developers’ time, a waste of development budget when there are more important things to do.”
I couldn’t believe it! My first response was jaw drop and eye pop and “what the??”; my second was to just throw it all in and walk out of there saying “Why do I bother?”; my third response was to think unkind thoughts about this person’s intelligence (but he’s an intelligent man); my fourth response – after I’d got over the initial shock – was to ask a respected colleague if he thought I was overreacting (he was equally gobsmacked, so I wasn’t overreacting); my next response was to IM a friend and colleague in the US to get her opinion to see if I was overreacting – she saw my full request and the full response and was equally appalled; my final response – after some hours of restraining myself – was to do a bit of research that showed that it’s not just me bleating about incomprehenisble error messages.
Here was the response I wrote (slightly edited):
====================
I stand by my assertion that ALL error messages in our applications should be useful and readable to the user – and that means plain English telling them what happened and, where possible, how to fix it.
Usable error messages have two main purposes:
* reduce user frustration with the application
* reduce support calls to whatever help desk exists (client’s or ours)
This is not “a folly” and a “waste of developers’ time”. It’s not even just my opinion – for example, see:
* http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010624.html
* http://www.experoinc.com/resources/papers/2005-06-ErrorMsgs.htm
* “…Where possible, error messages [in Windows 2000] give users specific actions to take, rather than just informing them that something went wrong…” (from:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional/evaluation/business/management.asp)
* http://www.eouroundtable.com/files/EOUupdatewp2000.pdf (page 9)
* “… Can the user recover from errors? What do users have to do to recover from errors? Does the product help users recover from errors? For example, does software present comprehensible, informative, non-threatening error messages? …” (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability)
While I agree that fixing this error message in <current, almost superseded product> is not a good use of developers’ time at the moment, it is essential that error messages in <product to come> are in plain English and meet the basics of letting the user know what happened, why, and how to fix it (where possible). We’ll get much better and more satisfied users that way.
=================
The tester was away all last week, so I’ll see what sort of response I get back on Monday!
Got this from someone at work yesterday – if it’s true, it puts a lot of pricing into perspective, including fuel prices. Unfortunately, no attribution.
Only 3 days ago, the politicians in Western Australia voted to trial daylight saving for the next three years, starting next weekend (Dec 3, 2006). Today Microsoft announced a Daylight Savings patch for Western Australia!
I’ve been getting daily emails about the state of my server ever since it was installed a couple of years ago. But about 3 or 4 weeks ago, I started noticing some unexplained errors, such as backups not being done, then a bad sector on the hard drive etc. I’ve been trying to contact the guy who put it together and who manages it remotely, but he seems to have dropped off the planet.
So after speaking to the sys admin guy at one of my workplaces, I bit the bullet and scheduled a time for a local company who deals in Microsoft Small Business Server and focuses on home and small business computer systems to come in and take a look at a few issues. Neil from PC Guru (http://www.pcguru.com.au) arrived right on time at 5:00pm on Tuesday afternoon (that’s always a big plus in my book!). He took a look at the logs and said what I was dreading – that he wouldn’t look at the other issues until he got the bad sector thing sorted… and he suspected a dying hard drive.
He discovered that the mirrored array wasn’t mirroring at all – and hadn’t been for some time. Then he tried to backup the data on to my desktop (which has plenty of space). But the backup script was one of the errors. So he tried a soft reboot, but then it went into Checkdisk mode (which he was trying to avoid until he got the data off), reporting a number of bad sectors. On boot up, there was a Registry Hive error (a nasty!!!). So Neil said that he’d take the server with him as he didn’t want to risk it and they would attempt to clone off the data in the office on Wednesday, but meantime replacement hard drives were required. It was now 6:30pm.
On Wednesday morning Neil called me with hard drive prices, and told me that he’d started the clone last night. Later that day I was called and told the cloning was still happening and that the ETA for my server was Thursday. And today I got told that were able to get the data off successfully – yay! The bad news was that the mirrored drive was totally dead, and the main drive was in a death roll (my words, not theirs). So two replacement 320GB hard drives later, and Aaron arrived this afternoon (on time!) to fit it all back together.
Unlike previous occasions when the server’s been down for whatever reason, this was absolutely painless. Everything just worked! The internet connected, the printer worked, network connections re-established by themselves, Exchange Server went and collected the email from the ISP as it should, and so on.
I’ve been very impressed with them to date, so much so that I have taken up one of their pre-paid plans. The things that have impressed me most have been:
I haven’t had such good customer experience from a company for a long time – I hope that they continue to maintain it as they grow.
And if you’re in Perth, I wholeheartedly recommend them just based on this brief experience so far. Details: http://www.pcguru.com.au; 1300 724 878
… of the country.
I flew to Sydney on Thursday as I was presenting at a conference there on Friday. I stayed on for the conference sessions on Saturday, and am now writing this in Sydney Airport awaiting my flight back to Perth. A quick trip!
Last night they changed the clocks in Sydney – actually, in all of NSW, Victoria and South Australia – going on to Eastern Summer Time. Which makes it very confusing when you have a flight later that day – is it due to depart at the stated time, the time plus or minus one hour, or what?
In Western Australia we’ve voted out Daylight Saving in three referendums, so it’s not a situation I’m used to… However, I’d better get used to it as it looks like our pollies will be voting very soon on trialling it in WA – if they haven’t done so already – and it’s likely to be up and running either by Dec 1 or Jan 1 if it gets through Parliament. Of course, the pollies tell us this is only “a trial” for 2 to 3 years, after which time they “might” have another referendum. Personally, I don’t care one way or the other about daylight saving as I avoid the heat of summer wherever possible by staying indoors!
Overall, the conference was good (a couple of sessions didn’t interest me), but there were one or two things about the venue (Citigate Sebel) that narked me a bit. First, the only loos we could use were through the restaurant, and they closed the restaurant between 3:00pm and 5:30pm! So we had to go downstairs to the lobby area, then up the stairs again from another angle. The other was the lack of anything to drink at the breaks other than tea and coffee (plenty of water was provided on the tables). Most conferences I’ve been to, have had some juice and soft drink available for those of us who don’t drink tea or coffee. After 2 days sitting in the conference, I’d drunk so much water, I was sloshing! I love water – but a small Diet Coke would’ve been nice occasionally.
I was lucky to stay with a multi-removed cousin (we have a common ancestor in the 1700s I think!) who was also attending the conference, so that meant I didn’t have to stay in a souless hotel, eating over-priced and uninspiring room service, and catching cabs or shuttles to and from the airport (she lives quite close to the airport though not in the flight path, thank goodness). It was good to curl up on a couch with the cat!
Just heard… flight to Perth is delayed at least an hour (as was the flight over, by the way).
Rhonda Bracey: At Random 